MAKING AN IMMIGRANT NATION
Ricardo Duchesne
Ever since Canada was officially designated a multicultural nation during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the 1970s the age-old British character of this nation has been under relentless assaults. Multiculturalism promulgates the equality of all races, religions and cultures; accordingly, it demands a Canada in which no particular ethnic group has a privileged position in the nation’s history and culture. Will Kymlicka, the most prominent scholar and salesperson of Canadian multiculturalism, sums up succinctly what it all entails: ‘Adopting multiculturalism is a way for Canadians to say that never again will we view Canada as a “white” country...as a “British” country (and hence compel non-British immigrants to relinquish or hide their ethnic identity).’ Non-British immigrants can retain and affirm their ethnic identity; they have a ‘distinctive group identity,’ which must be protected ‘from the impact’ of the ‘dominant’ white culture. 1 Of course, multiculturalism is always presented to the public through rosetinted glasses as a pluralistic philosophy dedicated to the prevention of discriminatory acts and xenophobic feelings. We hear continually that immigrants will integrate into Canada’s culture in accordance with its Charter of Rights, parliamentary institutions, and rule of law. Immigrants will be afforded ‘groups rights’ so as to increase their access to mainstream institutions (e.g., affirmative action), prohibit discrimination within these institutions (through harassment codes, sensitivity training), at the same time that they will be encouraged to disavow practices that restrict the civil liberties of their members. They will have the right to celebrate their particular heritages and 1 Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 57. Kymlicka’s entire career and academic output reflects almost verbatim the official ideology of the Canadian Government. Since the mid-1980s, as a young student (he was born in 1960), he has been the recipient, every single year without interruption, of highly lucrative grants and awards, including the Premier’s Discovery Award in 2009 ($250,000), the Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in 2005-2008 ($225,000), and the Killam Prize in Social Sciences in 2004 ($100,000). He portrays himself as a critic fighting the dominant discourse. religious beliefs while seeing themselves as members of a wider Canadian liberaldemocratic culture. But multiculturalism contains a negation within its very essence. It protects the group rights of non-Western peoples while simultaneously denying the host (Western) nation any group rights of its own. The host nation is seen as a neutral site characterized solely by its provision of individual rights, which apply to everyone, and its provision of group rights, which apply only to non-whites. The founding Anglo-French culture of Canada is indeed expected to suppress its own particularities in order to accommodate the particularities of ‘minorities’. The founders are mandated to be ethnically neutral, historically disinterested, and behave as if they were a people representing certain deracinated values that belong to ‘humanity.’2 While multicultural ideologues implicitly recognize that minorities have deep attachments to their ethnic backgrounds, and, in this vein, recognize that humans do have a natural attachment to their own heritage and ethnicity; they call upon whites to practice historical amnesia and pretend they were not the creators of Canada’s institutions, parliamentary traditions, and common law. The historical fact that Canada was built as a nation state around a founding ethnic core must be discarded and hidden from students.3 Children were once taught that Canada was a unique nation founded by two peoples, the French and the English. Then they were taught that the ‘Aboriginals’ were also a founding people, but that the English and French had dispossessed the Aboriginals who were here ‘first.’ Now they are learning to include Asians and new immigrants in the founding narrative of Canadian nationality. Newcomers are coming mostly from Asia; therefore Canadians should redefine their ‘roots of citizenship’ to reflect this new reality. In a 2002 publication, A Newcomer’s Introduction to Canada, released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada ‘for new immigrants,’ it was 2 Ibid, 60-71. Kymlicka’s argument against critics of multiculturalism is limited to showing that group rights are not inherently incompatible with individual rights; he insists that, under Canadian multiculturalism, groups are not entitled to practices that violate individual rights. I agree with his critics that the logic of group rights – intended to support the customs and ethnic integrity of immigrant groups -- encourages the preservation of traditional norms incompatible with individual rights. But the point I am making here is that multiculturalism only protects ‘the stability of national, ethnic, or religious groups’ that are external to, or different from, the majority group representing the host culture. The majority culture is expected to view its own nation-state as an ‘immigrant state’ dedicated to the continuous influx of masses in need of protection and affirmative action. 3 For an explicit, scientific argument on the genetic basis of ethnocentrism, see Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (2006). Kymlicka takes it for granted that minorities have ethnic identities and interests – only whites are prohibited from having such interests. announced that ‘Canada is a land of many cultures and many peoples.’4 Other than the Aboriginal people, everyone is an immigrant to Canada: ‘We have all come from somewhere else’. Canada has experienced many waves of immigrants; the current waves from Asia, Africa, Latin American and Muslim countries are more of the same past diversity. The lack of unity or a national culture in Canada is presented as a positive trait: ‘Through Canada’s history, millions of immigrants have helped to build this country.’ The Government defines visible minorities as ‘persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.’ New Canadians are encouraged to be proud of their religion and heritage. The white people are, apparently, invisible; their heritage now stands for a set of procedural laws and institutional templates– a market economy, equality under the law, democratic representation -- which belong to everyone. The British have no unique ancestry or ethnicity, whereas minorities represent authentic traditions celebrated for their color and vibrancy. The neutralization of whites, however, is not enough for current academics; the ‘long march through the institutions’5 must go on. Our esteemed liberal elites are also hard at work drawing attention to the colonizing activities of the first white settlers, their use of a ‘white supremacist’ ideology, their imposition of the Chinese Head Tax, their anti-Asia immigration laws, and their continued privileges as members of a ‘white hegemonic structure’ in Canada.6 These multiculturalists fashion themselves as 4 Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). A Newcomer’s Introduction to Canada. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services, 2002. 5Among paleo-conservatives this phrase stands for the gradual, non-violent, take over of Western culture by cultural Marxists, an incredibly successful strategy which has turned Western citizens against their old ethnic alliances, Christian values, and traditional family relations. Cultural Marxists may include feminists, multiculturalists, postmodernists, critical race theories, liberals, progressives, or deconstructionists; see Bill Lind. For an early, rather insightful prognostication of what this march would entail, see Helmut Schelsky, “The New Strategy of Revolution: The ‘Long March’ through the Institutions,” The Modern Age (Fall 1974). A lecture and short documentary by Lind on the origins of cultural Marxism can be found here and here. 6 The literature, symposiums, web pages, and programs on multicultural education in Canada have been imposed throughout every school and institution in the country. On the ‘embedded nature of discrimination in the education policies, pedagogical approaches, and curricular materials used at different levels of schooling and higher education’ in Canada, see (http://www.academicmatters.ca/2009/02/the-challenge-of-identity-the-experience-of-mixed-racewomen-in-higher-education/). All the publications dealing with university education in Canada, such as Academic Matters, University Affairs, CAUT Bulletin, are strongly in favor of expanding diversity education. On 29 January 2008, Toronto District School Board voted to establish ‘Afrocentric education’ in Toronto. It is never enough; John Ralston Paul, a popular Canadian intellectual, insisted in a recent interview (Spring 2012) that the making of ‘Canada as an Immigrant Nation’ changes ‘radically the way liberators uncovering the suppressed histories of minorities in the founding of Canada and correcting ‘the mythology that whites built Canada.’ Don’t be misguided by the ostensibly bookish character of the sources calling for the elevation of Chinese immigrants to a founding people: Peter Li’s, Chinese in Canada (1998); Wing Chung Ng’s Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80, The Pursuit of Identity and Power (1999); David Dyzenhaus and Mayo Moran’s Calling Power to Account: Law, Reparations, and the Chinese Canadian Head tax (2005); Shanti Irene Fernando’s Race and the City: Chinese Canadian and Chinese American Political Mobilization(2006); and Lisa Rose Mar’s Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (2010). The ideological tenor and multicultural orientation of all these books is evident. The main theme in Lisa Rose Mar’s book is how the Chinese have shaped their ‘ethnic culture and identities to claim recognition and acceptance in America’s multiracial, multicultural democratic state.’ Whether the United States may have been, and still is, a nation founded by Europeans and Christians who may wish to retain their own identity is not a question Rose Mar ever considers. She wants it to become multiracial, and this ideology drives her reflections. Likewise, Wing Chung Ng’s book is about how the Chinese in Vancouver shaped their cultural identity in the context of ‘Anglo Saxon racism’. He takes it for granted that Canada should ‘entrench and deploy multiculturalism’ and minimize its European-based identities. Each one of these historians argues that Canada’s white culture was essentially characterized by ‘systematic racism.’ Peter Li, beneficiary of multiple grants and consulting positions in various federal departments, insists that racism is ‘regularized and embedded in the social process’ of academic hiring, promotion, governance, research, and in the curriculum. HENRY YU AND THE ‘NEW PACIFIC CANADA’ The savviest user of the media in the advancement of Asian interests in Canada against its British heritage is Henry Yu. A history professor at the University of British Columbia, Yu enjoys demonizing Canada as ‘systematically racist’ in need of reparations through massive immigration from the non-Western world. He is the recent recipient of two huge grants, a $1.17 million project entitled ‘Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past,’ which will seek a major ‘reinterpretation of Canadian history through the lens of Chinese Canadians,’ as well as the welfare beneficiary of $950,000 from the Federal government to document the ‘ignored histories’ of one of the ‘founding peoples’ of Canada. Yu wants an Asianoriented Canada. we ought to be thinking about and therefore teaching Canadian citizenship, and the roots of Canadian citizenship.’ On April 24, 2012, the journalist Peter McMartin from The Vancouver Sun, which regularly accuses the white Anglo population of harboring racist attitudes towards Asians, wrote a column on the effect Chinese off-shore buyers were having on real estate prices in Vancouver, and the ‘dangers of racializing that issue.’ He approvingly cited Henry Yu’s words on ‘the mythologizing of [the country's] history’ by Europeandescendants; once whites let go of this mythology, they will realize that Chinese investment and massive immigration are part of Canada’s intrinsic identity. In an Op Ed piece in The Vancouver Sun (February 2, 2010), ‘Vancouver’s Own Not-So Quiet Revolution,’ Yu claimed that the English language ‘stunts diversity.’ Calling it a ‘colonial’ language, he demanded that Asian languages, long ‘silenced’ by ‘white supremacists’, be given the same official status. He even equated the presence of a high number of whites in leadership positions with ‘the legacy of a long history of apartheid and white supremacy.’ He taunted whites as to who is the minority now in Vancouver, ‘our city will soon be over 50 percent “visible majority,” with the vast majority of these “non-whites” of Asian heritage. Who is the “minority” in a city that has such strong historical and demographic connections to the Pacific?’ He says that recent immigration patterns have already created a whole new demographic reality in Canada, the old bilingual Canada ‘no longer makes sense;’ Canada has ceased to be a Western-Atlantic nation. Between 2001 and 2006, the top four places of births for immigrants were in Asia. ‘In 2006, 83.9 percent of all new immigrants to Canada came from regions outside of Europe.’ The five largest Canadian cities are heavily populated by Chinese ‘migrants.’ ‘In Vancouver, Canada’s third largest city, the visible minority is white.’7 This ‘new Pacific Canada’ marks a return to a Canada that was originally Pacific. The ‘dominance of white supremacy in immigration policy’ between the 1920s and 1960s disrupted this original Pacific/Chinese orientation. The history of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada between the 20s and 60s should be seen ‘as an aberration.’ Yu relies on two measly facts to support these claims: Asians built portions of the transcontinental railroad in the late 19th century, and the Chinese proportion of the population in British Columbia in 1901 was 10 percent. VANCOUVER IS A EUROPEAN CREATION Noticeable as their role was in Vancouver, the Chinese played a microscopic role in Canada`s history. In 1901, 96 percent of the Canadian population was European in origin; there were only 17, 043 Chinese immigrants (born outside Canada) relative to a population of 5.3 million. Vancouver, with the highest Chinese proportion throughout Canada’s history, was virtually a white European city from its beginnings in the 1870s to the 1980s. In the 1950s, when the city had been fully developed into a metropolis, the British accounted for about 75 percent of the population, and other Europeans 7 ‘Global Migrants and the New Pacific Canada,’ International Journal (Autumn, 2009accounted for about 18 percent, whereas the Asian proportion (Chinese and Japanese) accounting for only 3 percent. Patricia Roy's Vancouver, An Illustrated History (1980), exhibits a city that was overwhelmingly British in its architectural landscape, notwithstanding its Chinatown and Little Tokyo. All the major landmarks were British: the Post Office, built 1905-1910; Dominion Trust, the Canadian Pacific Railway station; Canadian Bank of Commerce; the Strand Theater and Birks Building, with their sidewalk canopies in 1933; the Tudor revival style homes in Shaughnessy Heights in the 1920s.8 The sports, the education, the legal system -- every institution was British. The Founding Fathers of Vancouver, the Mayors, the magistrates, the school trustees, the chief constables, the physicians, the presidents of the Board of Trade were all British descendents.9 The famed British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, calls Canada ‘quintessentially an immigrant society.’10 This is a falsehood. The British and the French were pioneers, not immigrants. They did not move from one nation to another; they were the creators of a new country ex nihilo, i.e. out of a wilderness. The Aboriginals were here first, but they didn't create Canada’s founding institutions. Living in tribal groups, the aboriginals reacted to, rather than participated in, the making of a new civilization in a massive continental landmass barely occupied. It can be argued indeed that the nationstate called “Canada” is British above all. The French were the founders of the colony of New France, which became the province of Quebec, but the Canadian nation with its parliamentary system and economic substructure across the country, including the majority of settlers and homestead farmers, were British. ‘VANCOUVER IS NO LONGER A CANADIAN CITY’ ‘The city has changed irrevocably in the last 20 years,’ Yu says. It has. With the implementation of Trudeau’s multicultural ideology, Vancouver, and all the major Canadian cities, would see a flood of non-Western immigrants. The total number of Chinese in Vancouver in 1951 was still a meagre 8,729, in a population of roughly 345.000; in 1961, it increased slightly to 15,223, and then to 30,640 in 1971. It was during the 80s that the gates were thrown wide open and the entire Third World was invited to come to Canada. Consequently, by the mid-90s, the Chinese population in Vancouver suddenly shot up to 300,000, out of a total population of 1.8 million. The percentage of Chinese in the large province of BC climbed to 10.6 percent by 2006. The Vancouver 8 See Historic Vancouver in the web, including links to Gastown, designated a national historic site, ‘Birthplace of Vancouver,’ lauded for its ‘splendid examples of Victorian and Edwardian commercial architecture, dating from 1886.’ 9 See also Robert McDonald’s, Making Vancouver, 1863-1913 (1996), and Alan Morley’s, Vancouver, From Milltown to Metropolis (1974). 10 ‘Misunderstanding Multiculturalism,’ The Guardian (October 14, 2006). population with British ethnic origins was reduced to 35.9 percent by 2006, whereas the Asian population climbed to 42 percent. ‘In Vancouver,’ Yu says euphorically, ‘you can't go to a neighbourhood now where Chinese aren't living in significant numbers. It's incredible.’11 Perhaps the best way to convey the transformation of a once British city into an increasingly Asian city is for readers to watch this moving video of Vancouver, circa 1960, just before the Asian invasion. Yu is correct about one thing, the city then was too white. It was also a jovial city, with a strong sense of community, playfulness, family life, and all round healthy living. This is certainly the image one gets from this next video of Vancouverites enjoying life in the city’s parks in 1940; harmoniously, with occasional presences (of happy) Asian children. Those days are gone. ‘Vancouver is clearly an Asia Pacific city now,’ says pollster Angus Reid, Canada’s most prominent public opinion surveyor.12 The city’s landscape has undergone a massive transformation atypical and unprecedented in the history of cities; however, the legacy of the past is still visible, creating a bi-polar atmosphere, with a purely market driven Asian side, dictated by external forces and controlled by foreign Chinese millionaires, and an European side standing for tradition, the environment, Britishness, and Vancouver as it was. The controversy over the ‘monster houses’ associated with Chinese real estate activities in the 1980s – a phrase prohibited in polite talk – stands as an accurate rendition of the huge, box-like, uniform, ugly houses that overwhelmed the old European style homes, ruining some of Vancouver’s elite neighborhoods. ‘Vancouver is no longer a Canadian city,’ Yu announces; it is ‘a global city that is one stop within the Pacific world, with two-thirds of male Canadians of Hong Kong origin between the ages of 25 and 40 living and working outside Canada.’ The city now has a Chinese global lifestyle --- one ‘that is common in Hong Kong, where people know that a key to making money is not to view the place you make money as necessarily the same place you live.’13 Canada, for these Pacific trotters is merely a neutral, deracinated place where alien businessmen make use of its better educational opportunities, exploit advanced medical treatment, and avoid the pollution they create back home. These migrants, it should be noted, come from a background in which ‘corruption is endemic...bribery, influence peddling and misuse of public funds are a regular staple.’ They covet Canada. A 2011 survey showed that more than half of China's millionaires 11 ‘Chinese Vancouver: A Decade of Change,’ The Vancouver Sun (June 30, 2007) 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. are either considering emigrating or have already completed their immigration applications, of which 37 percent of the respondents wanted to immigrate to Canada. These new breed of immigrants, Yu continues, ‘spend much of their time aloft commuting back and forth between Vancouver and Hong Kong.’ They are ‘residents with multiple homes throughout the world, creating great demand for real estate in Vancouver, but also leaving many condominiums unused for portions of the year’.14 Their true homes are in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong – places in which multiculturalism is not a word and immigration is prohibited. No wonder Yu prefers the term ‘migrant’ over immigrant -- it captures the new type of immigrant who is not interested ‘in one-way journeys to Canada’ but views Canada as a mere impersonal market devoid of ancestry and populated by a white citizenry heavily brainwashed into accepting the breakup of its past heritage as inevitable and progressive. Yet, for all this pro-Asian transformation, Senator Vivienne Poy, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1959, complained in 2007 to the Vancouver Club that ‘there is a lack of opportunities in Canada, partly due to systemic racism and partly because mainstream Canada is like a small club and slow in accepting outsiders.’15 This is not an isolated remark. Anti-racist hysterics are emblematic in contemporary Vancouver. Just Google the phrase “racism in Vancouver” and you will come up with links such as: ‘The Persistence of Anti-Asian Racism in Vancouver | Part I,’ The Mainlander, Vancouver’s Place for Progressive Politics (April 2, 2012); ‘’ ‘NeoNazi group’s racist hate crimes condone by public apathy,’ (March 19, 2012); Hundreds March Against Racism In Vancouver - YouTube (March 18, 2012 CBC News). Copious links follow with similar headings, ‘Racist hate crimes mobilize community,’ ‘Some comments on racism and sexism in Vancouver,’ ‘Another example of RCMP racism in Vancouver.’ The tenor of these rallies and charges is rather reminiscence of the purges and hysteria experienced habitually in Stalin’s Soviet Union against the ‘enemies’ of communism. The new enemies are whites who act against multiculturalism and massive immigration; if they do, they are ‘track down’ by a special crimes unit called the ‘B.C. Hate Crimes Team’.16 IMMIGRANTS WITH A HAN SUPREMACIST BACKGROUND 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Soon after the short version of this article was published in early September, I learned that the page “B.C. Hate Crimes Team” was removed from this site: http://www.embracebc.ca/embracebc/index.page?WT.svl=LeftNav The most baffling, ignorant component in the ideology of multiculturalism and the fight against ‘white racism’ is that immigrants generally come from cultures which, by our standards, are not merely illiberal but vulgarly racist. The academic world takes it for granted that whites are the only ones guilty of racial prejudices. Programs in Black Studies, Native Studies, Asian, Chicano, or Ethnic Studies abound; there are ‘Whiteness Studies,’ but they are about ‘the concept of white racial superiority and discrimination against non-whites.’ Yet research has shown that the formation of racial stereotypes and prejudices is common to all cultures; what is not common is that the West, and only the West, has produced theories examining the history, sociology, and psychology of racism. YU is a product of this Western obsession with racism. All his publications on white supremacy rely on Western theorists and sources. He ignores the works of Frank Dikötter. Starting with his book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992), followed by subsequent articles and books, Dikötter examines how traditional Chinese authorities commonly described as ‘ugly’ the ‘ash white’ skin and indelicate hairiness of Europeans, and the blacks as even uglier, as animals, devil-like and horrifying. More revealing is Dikötter’s thesis on how these traditional notions about inferior "barbarians" intermingled with Nazi forms of ‘scientific’ racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century. The concept of race came to be widely accepted as scientifically proven. Racial theories were disseminated through textbooks, anthropology exhibitions and travel literature, reaching the primary levels of education. Dikötter observes that, to this day, ‘skulls, hair, eyes, noses, ears, entire bodies and even the penises of thousands of subjects are routinely measured, weighed and assessed by anthropometrists who attempt to identify the “special characteristics” (tezheng) of minority populations.’ The dominant Han are described as the core of a ‘yellow race’ which includes in its margins all the minority populations. In another book, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (1998), Dikötter references government publications claiming that eugenics is a vital tool in the enhancement of the ‘biological fitness’ of the nation, heralding the twenty-first century as an era which will be dominated by ‘biological competition’ between the ‘white race’ and the ‘yellow race.’ A research team was indeed set up in November 1993 to isolate the quintessentially ‘Chinese genes’ of the genetic code of human DNA. Another revealing exposition of the everyday racial attitudes of the Chinese toward Africans is M. Dujon Johnson’s Race and Racism in the Chinas: Chinese Racial Attitudes towards Africans and African-Americans (2007). Johnson focuses on a series of incidents during the 1980s and 1990s, including one in which thousands of Chinese students set about assaulting and destroying the dormitories of African students in Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, shouting ‘Kill the black devils!’ The authorities did not prevent the demonstrations which went on for many days. Johnson observes, ‘[my experience] demonstrated to me on a daily basis how life in Chinese society is racially segregated and in many aspects similar to a system of racial apartheid.’ The visit by Condaleeza Rice to Beijing in 2008, which led to a flurry of racist postings on China’s websites, is quite telling. Many stigmatized Rice as ‘the ugliest in the world’… ‘I really can’t understand how mankind gave birth to a woman like Rice’… Some directly called Rice a ‘black ghost’, a ‘black pig’… ‘a witch’… ‘rubbish of Humans’… Some lamented: ‘Americans’ IQ is low — how can they make a black bitch Secretary of State’… Others did not forget to stigmatize Rice with animal names: ‘chimpanzee’, ‘bird-like’, ‘crocodile’, ‘a piece of rotten meat, mouse shit, [something] dogs will find hard to eat’. A similar outpouring of racial loathing marked the appearance in a talent show of Lou Jing, who has a Chinese mother and an African American father who left China before her birth.17 Recently, NBC News reported (May 16, 2012) that ‘racial discrimination is a harsh reality within China’s ESL industry, where recruiters actively seek the blond-hair, blue-eyed all-American archetype (along with similarly equipped Britons, Australians and other native speakers close behind). While brown hair also is acceptable, having a white face is a near-absolute requirement.’ Chinese elites have always been masters at using their quietness and cautiousness as a rhetorical device to delude Westerners with the quaint notion of Chinese innocence and purity. China is currently building an empire in Africa, based on the exploitation of cheap African labor, poor if any safety standards for workers, construction projects based on the cheapest and shoddiest Chinese materials – all in exchange for vital resources to feed the insatiable desires of 1.4 billion Chinese. That's the strategy: use dirt cheap construction materials to build up good will, then sweep in and take the natural resources. According to Peter Hitchens, Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and ‘employ African people in slave conditions.’18 China's ethnic composition is almost exclusively Han, 91.9 percent of the population. The ethnic minorities (Mongols, Zhuang, Miao, Hui, Tibetans, and Uighurs) are treated as second class citizens. Tibetans are routinely described as superstitious, lazy, ignorant, and dirty. Tibet is an independent country occupied by Chinese imperialists; Han migration is destroying their heritage; Han companies dominate the main industries; the Chinese get all the best jobs. The Tibetans are irritated that Chinese migrants eat their dogs (animals believed to be the last reincarnation before humans in Tibetan Buddhism); they don't walk clockwise around temples and monasteries, and they toss away their cigarettes at wooden temples and holy trees. The New York Times described one man whose house was burned down for no evident reason. When he tried to seek help, the authorities said, ‘What race are you? Tibetan? Go ask the Dalai Lama for help.’ 17 Peter Sharp, ‘Black 'Oriental Angel' Sparks China Race Row,’ Sky News HD (November 2, 2009). 18 Peter Hitchens, ‘How China has created a new slave empire in Africa,’ MAIL Online (September 28, 2009). See also, Rafael Marquez, ‘The New Imperialism: China in Angola,’ World Affairs (March/April 2011); ‘Africans are asking whether China is making their lunch or eating it,’ Economist (April 20, 2011). The province of Xinjiang, nominally an autonomous region, is being flooded with Han migrants. In 1949, Han Chinese amounted to only 5 percent of Xinjiang’s population; today they are up to 41 percent. Urumqi, the capital city, consists of 75 percent Han Chinese, of the 2.5 million inhabitants. The average Chinese views the natives from Xinjiang as backward and as ungrateful for not appreciating the modern infrastructure bestowed upon them by the Han.19 In the summer of 2009, this region saw violent riots by 2,000 to 3,000 thousand Uighur workers and Xinjiang separatists, in which approximately 150 Han Chinese were killed. The Communist reprisals were swift; up to 50,000 police and security personnel were sent to restore order, more than 2000 Uighurs were detained, and a few dozen were executed. The policy of Sinicization was intensified; in May 2010 Beijing announced a new development strategy to pour $1.5 billion into the region, encourage the migration of more Han Chinese businessmen, together with a ‘love the great motherland, build a beautiful homeland’ patriotic education campaign that aimed to indoctrinate the Uighurs that ‘ethnic minorities are inseparable from the Han.’20 QUESTIONS Multiculturalism calls upon Canadians to ‘never again view Canada as a white [or] a British country.’ This command has been thoroughly implemented in Vancouver. No one is allowed to call the city British. Anti-racist campaigns are regularly directed at whites, enforced in the schools and workplaces. Those who disagree are branded as ‘xenophobic demagogues,’ ‘neo-fascist,’ ‘right-wing extremists’.21 While the founders have been dispossessed, the Chinese migrants have been encouraged to retain their ethnic identity and maintain deep ties and loyalties to a country where Han supremacist ideas are officially sanctioned. How about some answers to these run of the mill questions: How can one argue that Han Chinese migration into Vancouver, Toronto, and Canada is a wonderful act of diversity when most of the “migrants” are coming from a country which exterminates diversity? Why are Anglo people the only ones disallowed from retaining their ethnic identity and ancestry? Why is the dismemberment of Anglo heritage, history, and ancestry in Canada viewed as progressive and its affirmation as xenophobic? Can we interpret Han migration into Vancouver, in combination with multiculturalism and the continuous campaigns 19 Samuel Chi, ‘Chinese Nationalism Begets Chinese Racism,’ Real Clear World (July 9, 2009). 20 http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=1615&catid=5&subcatid=89. According to the report, China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tensions, released by Minority Rights Group International (MRG) and Human Rights in China (HRIC), China's massive economic development strategy, excludes, marginalizes, and masks the increased repression of ethnic minority groups. 21 Will Kymlicka employs as discursive weapons these labels regularly, leaving no room for criticism and tolerance of alternate views: ‘multiculturalism must be seen as a success;’ ‘all the evidence suggests that multiculturalism has had good results,’ Finding Our Way, p. 58. against white racism, as a form of Sinicization? Why are whites the only people on the planet required and expected to accept diversity and massive immigration? Why is everyone assuming that pride, loyalty, and affection for Canada’s European heritage is incompatible with the very liberal-democratic values Europeans developed?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments always welcome!